The Australian research institute employing COVID-19 “natural origins” theory promoter Dr. Danielle Anderson – an alum of the Wuhan Institute of Virology – has received multi-million dollar donations from Chinese Communist Party-linked companies and foundations including TikTok, The National Pulse can reveal.
Anderson – the last and only foreign scientist to have worked in the Wuhan Institute of Virology – appears to be the latest Western scientists downplaying the possibility of COVID-19 tracing its origins to the Wuhan lab.
“She still believes it most likely came from a natural source,” a Bloomberg profile notes. And these comments have earned her praise from Chinese Communist Party officials, including Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin:
Many scientists in the international community who uphold science, reason and objectivity, including Dr. Anderson, have expressed unequivocal opposition to politicizing the origin-tracing by some in the US.
Dr. Anderson also said that there were strict protocols and requirements at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and entering and exiting the facility was a carefully choreographed endeavor. Responding to the Wall Street Journal report which claimed three researchers from the lab were hospitalized with flu-like symptoms in November 2019, she said no one she knew at the Wuhan institute was ill toward the end of 2019.
Beyond her personal ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology potentially clouding her analysis of COVID-19’s origins, Chinese Communist Party-linked entities including TikTok and Alibaba founder Jack Ma’s personal foundation funneled millions of dollars to her current employer: the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity and the University of Melbourne.
Prior to joining the Doherty Center, Anderson
served as an Assistant Professor at Duke-NUS Medical School, where she authored studies bolstering the Chinese Communist Party’s narrative that frozen food imports were
contributing to COVID-19 cases in
China.
“Importation of contaminated food and food packaging is a feasible source for such outbreaks and a source of clusters within existing outbreaks,” the paper’s abstract notes. Footnotes also reveal the authors uncritically cited state-run media
outlets such as
Global Times to underpin their analysis:
An outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 in the Xinfadi wholesale market in Beijing has been accredited by Chinese authorities to imported contaminated food (1). It occurred 55 days after the last identified locally acquired case in Beijing. Steps to mitigate the risk of similar outbreaks have been taken within China, yet elsewhere this risk is underappreciated.
In
June 2020, TikTok donated $2 million to the Doherty Institute, where she serves as a Senior Research Fellow, to broadly support the center’s
“work on COVID-19.”“We’re so grateful to
TikTok for throwing their weight behind science with this generous donation and campaign support,” said Doherty Institute Director Sharon
Lewin. “This generous donation will significantly enhance our efforts to perform innovative clinical trials for COVID-19 and similar viruses,” she added.
The parent company of TikTok, which itself has come
under fire for its close
ties to the Chinese Communist Party, is the Beijing-based tech firm ByteDance, which has seen its founder and CEO pledge to use the company to “promote socialist core values.” Insiders have
revealed how ByteDance controls virtually all of TikTok’s operations, including the ability to covertly access data on U.S. users.
In March 2020, the Jack Ma Foundation donated nearly $2.5
million to the Doherty Institute with the declared
purpose of “expediting the creation of a vaccine against COVID-19.” “While the path to creating a vaccine is complex, we have the expertise and infrastructure here at the Doherty Institute to take on this task, and now, thanks to the Jack Ma Foundation, the funding to accelerate this significant project,” remarked the Doherty Institute President.
Alibaba – whose “senior executive ranks included sons or grandsons of the most powerful members of the ruling Communist Party” – has strong financial ties to the Chinese government. In 2015, Forbes
reported the “Chinese Government Has A Huge “Stake” In Alibaba” and
The New York Times unearthed the company’s
“deep political connections” to several state-run investment firms including Boyu Capital, Citic Capital Holdings and CDB Capital, the China Development Bank’s private investment arm.
Anderson remains on the
Lancet COVID-19 commission’s “Origins of the Pandemic”
committee, which recently
recused EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak over his ties to the Wuhan
Institute of Virology, gain-of-function
research, and
the Chinese Communist Party.
